Q071: I absolutely love the quote, "I think that it was maybe because I had music that I never became a terrorist." Were you an angry young man? What kind of schools did you go to, and how did you feel in them?
A071: When I was around six or seven and I first started reading manga, my mother bought me a set of books about the lives of famous people in history. I read them from cover to cover, and I felt a lot of sympathy for the lives of Napoleon and Oda Nobunaga. After that I started to read historical novels and books about war. I got obsessed with revolutionaries on the imperial side in the lead up to the 19th century Meiji Restoration in Japan, and with the lifestyles of dictators like Hitler. When I was about ten I had this vague idea that I'd like to become someone who changes the world, and this eventually escalated into dreams of causing a worldwide revolution (not in the Marxist sense) and controlling the world. I don't think I was especially angry at the world - I just had this longing for the idea of revolution. I remember saying that if I had power I would start a guerrilla movement to depose myself and seize power. I must have been interested in the process by which revolutions fail or succeed, and particularly in the plots and mindgames that go along with this process - I saw the whole thing as a kind of game in which it would be worth gambling your life. I went to normal schools, but I was the kind of kid who always loved to annoy the teacher by asking difficult questions. I loved getting the rest of the kids to back me up in debates with the teacher about politics. I loved the psychological aspects of politics, and I used to enjoy manipulating groups within the extra-curricular clubs to fight against each other. This was probably because I have a real loathing of group activities, so I would manipulate things to create situations more amenable to me personally. However once I discovered music, my early dreams of becoming a politician or a philosopher disappeared entirely.